BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobiles rack up 20 years of use Mobiles rack up 20 years of use Comedian Ernie Wise makes the UK's first mobile phone call Mobile phones in the UK are celebrating their 20th anniversary this weekend. Britain's first mobile phone call was made across the Vodafone network on 1 January 1985 by veteran comedian Ernie Wise. In the 20 years since that day, mobile phones have become an integral part of modern life and now almost 90% of Britons own a handset. Mobiles have become so popular that many people use their handset as their only phone and rarely use a landline. Slow growth The first ever call over a portable phone was made in 1973 in New York but it took 10 years for the first commercial mobile service to be launched. The UK was not far behind the rest of the world in setting up networks in 1985 that let people make calls while they walked. The first call was made from St Katherine's dock to Vodafone's head office in Newbury which at the time was over a curry house.

For the first nine days of 1985 Vodafone was the only firm with a mobile network in the UK. Then on 10 January Cellnet (now O2) launched its service. Mike Caudwell, spokesman for Vodafone, said that when phones were launched they were the size of a briefcase, cost about ï¿½2,000 and had a battery life of little more than 20 minutes. In 1986 phones were big, bulky and black "Despite that they were hugely popular in the mid-80s," he said. "They became a yuppy must-have and a status symbol among young wealthy business folk." This was also despite the fact that the phones used analogue radio signals to communicate which made them very easy to eavesdrop on. He said it took Vodafone almost nine years to rack up its first million customers but only 18 months to get the second million. "It's very easy to forget that in 1983 when we put the bid document in we were forecasting that the total market would be two million people," he said. "Cellnet was forecasting half that." Now Vodafone has 14m customers in the UK alone.

Cellnet and Vodafone were the only mobile phone operators in the UK until 1993 when One2One (now T-Mobile) was launched. Orange had its UK launch in 1994. Both newcomers operated digital mobile networks and now all operators use this technology. The analogue spectrum for the old phones has been retired. Called Global System for Mobiles (GSM) this is now the most widely used phone technology on the planet and is used to help more than 1.2 billion people make calls. Mr Caudwell said the advent of digital technology also helped to introduce all those things, such as text messaging and roaming that have made mobiles so popular. Britain's first mobile-phone call was made 30 years ago - CNET Britain's first mobile-phone call was made 30 years ago Britain's first mobile-phone call was made 30 years ago Discover the history of the UK's first mobile-phone call, on 1 January 1985; meet the first person in Britain to buy a mobile phone; and find out how Ernie Wise was involved.

Up Next Nintendo Switch: All the details you've been waiting for Comedian Ernie Wise re-creates the UK's "first" mobile-phone call for photographers.Photo by Vodafone Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was at number one, Colin Baker was Doctor Who, and "Beverly Hills Cop" was in cinemas. But as 1984 ticked into 1985, 1 January ushered in more than just a new year: it was the start of a new era, as the first mobile-phone call in the UK was made that very day 30 years ago. Britain's first official call on a mobile (following a beta test in London) was made on 1 January 1985 by 24-year-old Michael Harrison, son of Vodafone chairman Sir Ernest Harrison. Michael slipped out of the family New Year's Eve party in Surrey and drove to Parliament Square in Westminster with a Vodafone Transportable VT1 phone, also known as Nokia's Mobira Talkman . After Big Ben had struck 12 to ring in the new year, Harrison junior dialed home and greeted his father, "Hi Dad, it's Mike. Happy New Year.

This is the first ever call on a UK mobile network." Dawn of a new era Vodafone was first to go mobile with the New Year's Eve call, but the head start was brief: BT Cellnet -- the forerunner of today's O2 -- launched its service just days later on 10 January 1985. Entertainer Ernie Wise, best known for his double act with Eric Morecambe , promoted the network a couple of weeks later with a photo-call at London's St Katharine Docks during which he also dialed chairman Harrison, giving rise to the popular belief it was Little Ern who made the first mobile call. Michael Harrison (left) smiles into the handset of a Vodafone VT1, which connected to a portable base station. Harrison is placing the actual first British mobile-phone call, from Parliament Square to his father, Vodafone chairman Sir Ernest Harrison (right).Photo by Vodafone It was another eight years before anyone else got involved, when digital networks Mercury One2One and Orange launched in 1993 and 1994. One2One became T-Mobile in 2002, and the two networks merged under the banner of EE in 2009.

Mobile carrier Three joined in the fun in 2002 when the country switched to Internet-friendly 3G. Smartphones took the mobile phone to new popularity, and in 2011 the volume of calls made from mobile overtook landlines for the first time. The first mobiles had gone on sale in the US in 1983, a decade after the first mobile-telephone call in the world was made on 3 April 1973 by Motorola's Martin Cooper . Standing outside the New York Hilton, Cooper used a Motorola DynaTAC to call the head of research at rival Bell Labs to let him know Bell had just lost the race. 14 13 phones that changed the world Chunky phones like the VT1 and VM1 followed, but the mobile phone as we know it began to take shape with the now-iconic Motorola 8000X, the quintessential Gordon Gekko-endorsed 1980s brick phone. And the change was huge. One of the earliest users in the UK was John Fava, who took part in the beta test in December 1984.

"In those days, although car phones existed they were horrendously expensive and went in the back of a Roller," Fava said. "But here was a Ford Sierra with a mobile phone and the ability to call anywhere in the world! It soon changed our working life." First in line The first customer was investment banker Mungo Park. "I had a family friend, Ivon Donn, who became a [mobile phone] salesman," Park remembers. "He called me and said 'I got the job, I got the job...do you want to buy a phone?'" Being the first customer had one unexpected perk: Park never actually paid for the phone. "We filled in the form, but the form and the cheque were used at presentations and conferences and the induction courses for new salesmen -- so they never banked the cheque!" The Motorola VM1 was the first mobile phone sold in the UK. It cost £1,471, weighed nearly 5kg, and had to be installed in your car.Photo by Vodafone Park owned the VM1, a popular early model for businessmen on the go because it was installed in a car. It cost £1,471.

"The big thing went in the boot," Park remembers, "the cradle went under the armrest of the car and the aerial went on the roof. It was aesthetically ugly. You wouldn't look very cool walking down the street with that." The model used to make the very first call, the Transportable VT1, suffered from a bit of a misnomer: it weighed nearly 5kg. When Vodafone's sales director visited Buckingham Palace to demonstrate the phone, police initially thought it was a bomb. A life changer The mobile phone had an instant impact on Mungo Park's life."I was working for an American investment bank in London, but because of the time difference, Wall Street didn't close until 9pm. We had to be fully staffed in our office until 9pm, but we were also dealing with Switzerland, the Netherlands and everything else, which meant we had to be in at 7am. So what it meant was that on the way into the office I could speak to Zurich and speak to Amsterdam, and then at 7 or 8pm. I could actually leave the office and still be in instant contact with New York.

When they said somebody wants to do this or that it actually meant we could do the transaction. "From a straightforward economic point of view it made absolute sense -- and for quality of life, because we were working from 7 in the morning to 9 at night every day of the week, which wasn't much fun. So it was a great business tool and a real life-changer." The Transportable Vodafone VT1, which made the first mobile call, on New Year's Day 1985, cost £1,650 and weighed 4.5kg.Photo by Richard Trenholm/CNET Another early customer, Roger Southam -- who is still a Vodafone customer -- also saw a VM1 transform his business. "I was in property, so I spent a lot of time going between sites, right the way up to Liverpool and down to Southampton and across to Bristol. "We'd drive, we'd go and look at the building and you'd either save up lots of scraps of paper to spend the next day back in the office on the phone, or you'd be clipping how much time you could spend on the road. The efficiency of having the phone gave me an extra day a week basically.

It just made life so, so simple. Being mobile was the most extraordinary thing on the planet." Not everybody saw the potential, however. "Not many companies leapt in straight away," remembers Southam. "A lot of companies saw the expenditure rather than the saving. It would get one of two reactions: it would be seen as very efficient, or seen as very flash." The quintessential 1980s "brick," the £2,995 Motorola 8000X (left), and the £1,875 VPI Citiphone, which played "God Save the Queen" if you pressed 001.Photo by Richard Trenholm/CNET It wasn't just the cost of the hardware that limited the early adoption of mobile phones. "You were paying £1,200 for the phone but also 33p a minute," remembers Southam. "Change in the tariffs made it more accessible, especially when you started getting the bundling of free phones with a contract.

Those two things ran in tandem: the technology has gone down one route in terms of size and your ability to carry it around, but the other side of the coin is how pricing has changed, how packaging has changed and how competition has changed." How they built the network Vodafone began in 1982 as part of Racal Electronics, then one of Britain's biggest makers of military radio technology. The Vodafone name was chosen to smush together "voice," "data" and "fone." Mike Pinches was Vodafone's first technical director, responsible for creating the network's infrastructure from scratch. "I was one of the first five employees," he remembers. "I was asked by Gerry Whent, who founded the company, to be the technical director from the beginning. I joined on 1 April 1983 and I retired in 2002." The first phones used the analogue Total Access Communication System (TACS), which was later replaced in the 1990s by GSM. "The standard was based very heavily on the US AMPS first-generation analogue standard," recalls Pinches, "with the smallest modifications we were allowed to get away with.

That gave us the best chance to get equipment from the manufacturers." Right from the start, the clock was ticking. "We had a license obligation to open service before 31 March '85," remembers Pinches. "That was the deadline, but we managed to open on 1 January -- although we frankly didn't have all that many phones or all that many customers!" 19 From brick phones to pocket computers in 40 years (pictures) The early priority was to make sure the signals reached far and wide. "The whole concept of cellular comms is that to start with, when you haven't got many customers, you want as much coverage as possible, so you want masts to give you wide area coverage. The more customers you get, the more you need to shrink the cell sites and reuse the same frequency time and time again. Early designs were based on cellular beehive structures, which were hexagonal because you can divide a hexagon into three smaller hexagons inside each other. "The day we launched, each frequency was used effectively only once in London. Today it's probably reused 200 times in the London area and that's what gives you much greater capacity.

But to start with we didn't have a capacity problem, we had a coverage problem. The first part of the site build was getting coverage out up the M1 to Birmingham, extending it in the southeast, getting up to Manchester, and then gradually trying to creep out all over the map." BT battles At the time, the only telecoms network in the UK was British Telecom. Pinches says, "We had a very clear objective: to give BT the fright of their lives." The two rival networks found themselves in an odd situation, however, as they had to agree on a first-generation standard. "BT were attempting to strangle us at every opportunity, and the first thing we had to do was sit down with them!" remembers Pinches. It's good to talk Text messages turn 20 today First was the small matter of connecting the two networks. BT initially wanted Vodafone to give each customer their own local exchange line. "We said consider us another country overlaid on Britain," Pinches countered, "and we'd like to interconnect at the international exchange level, which was the opposite extreme. Eventually common sense prevailed and we beat out a method of connection that still works." More conflict ensued.

"They wanted to approve all of our equipment because BT had that right in those days. I still remember that meeting when they said they wanted to approve our equipment. We gulped a bit, thought for a moment, and said OK, that's reasonable, and because we are an equivalent licensed public telecoms operator, we have exactly the same status as you -- so you won't have any objection to us approving your equipment at your end. They gulped a bit, and again common sense eventually prevailed. "Quite a strange relationship we had, but quite effective, and it obviously worked." Mast-ers of the universe The next job was to figure out where to actually put the kit that would carry the mobile signals. "We had to design where we wanted base station sites to put the masts up, negotiate with whoever owned the land or the building, and connect it to our exchanges. Pretty much all our connections were provided by BT, so again for our biggest competitor we were one of their biggest customers, ordering landlines at a huge rate. Masts were placed on buildings including the Royal Exchange, the Thames Barrier and Crystal Palace, with a freestanding mast in Highgate. Another base station was located at the Royal Lancaster hotel near Hyde Park.

Back in time It's 2014. Why is my battery stuck in the '90s? "We hired a suite in December 1984 and held a weeklong intensive trial," remembers Pinches. "We had somewhere around 30 vehicles, each with one of our guys who knew what he was doing and one graduate from the graduate trainee scheme assigned to help them map-read and log what was happening. Each team had a designated area to go and drive around to make and receive calls and see if there were any problems. "We had a big wash-up meeting just before Christmas, which on the whole at that time looked as if it had gone pretty well. Then the board of directors had a big meeting after Boxing Day to decide what they were going to do next. Gerry sat at the end of the table and said, "It looks like we might be able to launch," and we went round the table one at a time: "Do you think we should?

Do you think we should?" We all said "Yes!" And we took the decision then that we'd try and spring a surprise on BT on 1 January, which they weren't expecting." All was fair in love and war and in the strange relationship between BT and Vodafone. "Because we had a contract obligation to launch by the end of March we'd managed to lull BT into thinking we were going to launch back then sometime," says Pinches. "It was all a bit hush-hush, we were desperately trying to keep it quiet, hence leaving the decision as late as possible." The work done by Mike Pinches and his colleagues at Vodafone and rivals at BT laid the groundwork for the mobile phone revolution. "We knew it was important," recalls Pinches, but he admits, "I wasn't thinking 30 years ahead!" So much has changed between then and now. "Now my MacBook talks to my iPhone, which is magic," says John Fava, "I couldn't have envisaged that 30 years ago.

What happened in the last 30 years has been so gigantic you couldn't have predicted -- and don't ask me what's going to happen in the next 30 years!" Thirtieth anniversary of first UK mobile phone call Choose your country for customer service, offers and more Thirtieth anniversary of first UK mobile phone call 31 Dec 2014 Britain's first-ever mobile phone call was made on Vodafone’s UK network 30 years ago Michael Harrison, the son of Vodafone’s first Chairman, made the call on 1 January 1985 Thirty years later, Vodafone is an industry leader with 438 million customers, mobile operations in 26 countries and fixed broadband operations in 17 countries Britain’s first-ever mobile phone call was made 30 years ago on the newly-launched Vodafone network. Michael Harrison, the son of former Vodafone Chairman Sir Ernest Harrison, was the first to test the system, calling his father at midnight on 1 January, 1985.

Michael Harrison making Britain’s first-ever mobile phone call Michael Harrison secretly left his family’s New Year’s Eve party at their home in Surrey in the UK to surprise his father, calling him from London’s Parliament Square. Harrison made the historic call from one of the first mobile devices – a Transportable Vodafone VT1, which weighed 11lb (5kg) and had around 30-minutes of talk time. Harrison recalls that the line was crystal clear, although the excited shouting of New Year’s Eve revellers in London created considerable background noise. As Sir Ernest Harrison answered the phone, Michael said: “Hi Dad. It’s Mike. This is the first-ever call made on a UK commercial mobile network”. At the other end of the line, champagne corks popped and photographers captured the moment - the culmination of three years of hard work since the bid was made to win the licence in 1982. Days later, a large crowd gathered at St Katherine’s Dock in London to watch comedian Ernie Wise make the first public mobile phone call.

Wise brought the same Transportable device to St Katherine’s Dock in London in a 19th century mail coach, using one of the oldest forms of communications – sending a letter – to highlight the speed and convenience of these new mobile phones. Ernie Wise making the first public mobile phone call Ernie Wise’s call was received at the original Vodafone headquarters, where a handful of employees were based in an office above an Indian restaurant in Newbury, Berkshire. For the first nine days of 1985, Vodafone was the only company with a mobile network in the UK. Heavy and cumbersome, the first generation of mobile phones were sold in the UK from 1984 – before the first products were even available and before the network was officially live. Such was the demand for a fully portable, cellular phone that more than 2,000 orders had been taken by the Vodafone sales team before Michael Harrison made his call from Parliament Square. By the end of 1985, over 12,000 devices had been sold.

The VT1, used by Michael Harrison and Ernie Wise All were far from portable and cost around £2,000 – equivalent to roughly £5,000 when taking the inflation rate in to account. However, the early mobile phones symbolised a revolution in communications and were instantly desired by the emerging ‘yuppy’ set, whose love for the brick-like devices was documented in films and TV shows, from Wall Street to Only Fools and Horses. Ferrari-driving executives in the first wave of adverts particularly appealed to this market. “You can be in when you’re out” declared full-page ads, created by advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to run in every major British newspaper. Thirty years later, Vodafone’s technology, once favoured by a select few, now plays a central role in the lives of more than 400 million people on every continent. Vodafone has become a global pioneer in bringing the benefits of the mobile and digital revolution to consumers and businesses across the world.

An innovator, Vodafone leads the industry in the development of transformational technologies, from offering 4G services in 15 countries to providing services such as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology and M-Pesa, the mobile payment service that provides financial freedom to millions of people. Vodafone's evolution is accelerating rapidly: in 2013, Vodafone embarked upon Project Spring - the largest capital investment programme in its history - committing around £19 billion over two years to expand its networks and services across its major markets in Europe, Asia and Africa. Vodafone Group Chief Commercial and Operations Officer Paolo Bertoluzzo said: "At launch, the founders of Vodafone targeted British 'business executives, sales representatives, journalists, doctors and veterinary surgeons'. Thirty years later, Vodafone's customers range from young people in Europe, India and Africa through to the world’s largest multinational businesses. While our business has changed beyond all recognition over the last three decades, our goal and purpose haven’t: to continue to empower our customers, whoever and wherever they are, through connectivity, as mobile, broadband and digital transform society in ways unimaginable in the 1980s".

Vodafone is asking people to share their memories of getting their first mobile phone and making their first mobile call, using the hashtags #myfirstmobile and #30yearsVodafone. Young people born in the 90s with 1985 mobile phones How Vodafone built the UK's first mobile network By Adam Bunker - 01 August 2012 Find out what Ernie Wise was saying, how we built the country's first mobile network - and why an 'f' was so much better than a 'ph' on our Facebook Timeline... Home › Uncategorized › Setting up the UK’s first mobile network… Find out what Ernie Wise was saying, how we built the country's first mobile network - and why an 'f' was so much better than a 'ph' on our Facebook Timeline... Ernie Wise places the first mobile phone call back in the 1980s What does the year 1991 mean to you?

It was year in which the first Gulf War began; Boris Yeltsin began his first term as President of Russia; Sega published the first Sonic the Hedgehog game; and Tim Berners-Lee showed off this new ‘web page’ thing – but would it ever take off? “I spent a memorable part of that year driving around the M25 marking an ‘X’ on the map in GSM black spots,” Paul Brereton says. ‘X’ marks the spot. The mobiles on the dashboard looked like outer space Brereton is a long standing Vodafone employee who remembers the days when going to work often meant shuttling between dozens of small offices spread across Newbury, and the IT department was made up of only two people. “Maybe its just nostalgia, but we really had good parties. We had an annual Spring Ball somewhere nice like Highclere Castle where a kilted bagpiper would pipe in the platter of beef.” His first job was controlling the stock in the warehouse, where he would literally sign out every car kit and piece of equipment. No wonder he volunteered get out and about testing the UK’s first digital GSM network. “They lent me a brand new company car, and drilled seven handsets into the dashboard.

Then I drove round and round the M25 for a week making calls, plotting network blackspots on a map (no GPRS in those days!). By the end of the week we were quite bored and decided to drive into London for an unscheduled lunch break.” Unfortunately an argument about where to place the ‘X’ on the map led to Brereton driving straight into the back of some stationary traffic. “The police let us off with it, they were more interested in the mobile phones on the dash board as at that time it looked like something from outer space.” Even so, the crack GSM testing team returned a little sheepishly to Newbury with the front bumper tied on with string, and the front wing sticking out of the boot! Those days are long gone, but far from forgotten. We’ve added some of the other landmarks to our Facebook Timeline and here’s a little more info behind some of our favourites. How it all began It all began above an Indian restaurant with a guy called Gerry and an f’ not a ‘ph’. In November 1983 Gerry Whent cancelled his holiday with only seconds to spare in order to lead Racal’s bid for the UK’s second mobile phone licence.

Then came the hard part – building the network, and deciding what to call the company… Vodafone or Vodaphone? Advertising gurus Saatchi and Saatchi were convinced the famous Vodafone ‘f’ would become an iconic part of the company’s brand – but not many of the original directors agreed with them. The name originated from the combination of voice and data services the network would offer – as in voice-data-phone – but CEO Gerry Whent particularly objected to the ‘f’ until Saatchi and Saatchi begged him to reconsider. “In for a penny, in for a pound – and you can have your flippin’ ‘f’ as well!” Gerry Whent gave way, and the name Vodafone was launched on March 22nd 1984 in a press release that predicted the new service would be very popular with people on the move, including businessmen, doctors and even “veterinary surgeons”. Choosing a phone? How about ‘The Transportable’ Memories of first mobiles are a bit like flashbacks of first love – nostalgic, but a tiny bit embarrassing. Did we ever really adore something so clunky?

The answer is yes – and in the mid 1980s many would have killed to get their hands on the Mobira Transportable which weighed in at a mighty 11 pounds (the same as a miniature Daschund) It was better than the other option at the time – a fixed car phone. Luckily demand for a truly mobile phone was so strong that Vodafone started offering the Motorola 8000X in March 1985. The Motorola 8000X was a more manageable 850g, and offered a whopping 30 minutes of talk time. So what do you think of it so far? After network trials run from a room in London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel in Bayswater that was kitted out with a giant map and some coloured sticky dots, Vodafone’s leadership team met in a small building near the M4 motorway on Christmas Eve 1984 – and flipped the big switch. Britain’s first commercial mobile phone call was actually made by Michael Harrison, the son of Vodafone’s first chairman Sir Ernest Harrison, when he called his father at one second past midnight on January 1st 1985.

But it was the press call later that day by the man with the “short, fat, hairy legs” that people remember most. Comedian Ernie Wise was dressed up in Dickensian costume and riding on a 19th century Mail Coach in Parliament Square when he dialed up. He also called Sir Ernest Harrison back at Vodafone headquarters in Newbury. History hasn’t recorded exactly what Ernie said – but he may have sparked the enduring phrase….“I’m on the train….” For those first nine days of 1985 Vodafone was the only company with a mobile network in the UK. Do you remember your first text? It’s hard to believe but there was a time when no one thought texting would take off. Although texting emerged from the world of ‘paging’ (remember that?) businesspeople weren’t keen on tapping out long communications with tiny little keys – and teenagers were still blissfully mobile-free in those days. Gradually, however, Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis persuaded manufacturers to add Short Message Service (SMS) to their handsets, and the popularity of texting spread – aided a little bit by a loophole in the Vodafone system that meant texts were first sent for free.

It was Richard Jarvis who received the world’s first ever text message, sent on Christmas Eve 1992 from one of his test engineers, 22 yr old Neil Papworth. The message read: “Happy Christmas”. Surviving the flood “We’re so much bigger now,” Paul Brereton says, looking back on his long history with the company, “but actually the things that I originally liked about Vodafone are still true – and I guess that’s why I’m still here.” “When the Newbury Campus flooded back in 2007 (so badly that to leave by the back entrance meant swimming in waist deep water!) I was one of the essential staff who had to come into work the next day. I was cold, wet and fed up – but then I heard that they’d brought in a food trailer in the car park. I sat outside, ate a bacon butty and listened to a live band hired especially to cheer us up – and I thought that even in a company as big as this, there are still those nice small touches.” If you’re interested in the chronology of Vodafone’s evolution, head on over to our Facebook page and check out the Timeline .

Tags First 3G phones Mobile phone use spread slowly at first, but gathered pace as prices came down. Whilst there were only four networks in the UK, a large number of companies tried their hand at supplying handsets. Phillips, Alcatel, Orbitel, Nortel, NEC, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Maxon, Technophone, Swatch, Siemens, Sony and British Telecom are a few of the brands people will remember. However, three names emerged as market leaders, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia. Motorola, the maker of the world's first hand portable, focussed on attention grabbing, high status products. Ericsson, one of the oldest names in the telecommunications industry, reluctantly entered the handset business in the 80s. However, Finnish firm Nokia's commitment to good design with a human face was the winning formula. If a phone was easy to use, it was popular, but it was also good for the network operator. People were much more likely to use their mobile if it was easy to look up a friend's number, if not, they would use a landline phone. So operators pushed phones that were easy to use. Nokia's commitment to usability gave its phones a significant advantage over competitors.

Finally fun and fashion became the important selling factors. Nokia's team of young designers was able to understand and exploit both the young professional and the teenage market and keep their phones the coolest. More recently another firm famous for its design aesthetic and the usability of its products, Apple, pushed Nokia off its top spot. To go back to the beginning, the story of mobile phones in the UK began many years before Ernie Wise made that call. Car phones Courtesy of BT Heritage The UK's first mobile phone users were motorists in Manchester. A car radio phone system began in Manchester in 1959. The state owned, General Post Office or GPO, ran the network . Subscribers, as they were called, in South Lancashire could connect for �195 (more than �3000 in today's money). There were only six channels which meant only six calls could take place at the same time and all calls were placed through the operator. There were eighty-six subscribers by 1963, but the GPO made a loss on the service. Nevertheless, the GPO persevered with the car radio service.

In 1965, the same year as the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower) opened for business, a new car radio telephone service, called 'System 1' started in London. The Postmaster General made the first call to Richard Dimbleby. Calls cost from 1s 5d for the first three minutes. By 1983, the service was 'System 4' and could handle calls automatically without an operator. It was still highly exclusive as radio bandwidth was a scarce resource. When cellular networks arrived in 1985 car phones remained one of the most popular ways to go mobile. The cost of miniaturising the technology was high, so hand held phones were much more expensive. Powerful car mounted transmitters and receivers could also make the most of the limited coverage. When the Carphone Warehouse was launched in 1989, car phones were the still cheapest way to own a mobile. From car phones to cellular phones The problem with the early car phone networks was that there were a limited number of channels and only one pair of people could use one channel at the same time. This meant that the systems being such a scarce resource would always be expensive.

Engineers had already come up with a way to solve this problem: the cellular network. Divide the area of the network into cells and imagine that people don't move when they make the calls, then the channels only need to be unique within a cell. If now you allow people to move, essential for a car phone network, you only need the channel to be unique in a one cell and all adjacent cells. When the car moves from one cell to another, some magic, must give the phone another channel in the new cell. That magic is hardware and software which was not able to do this complex switching until the end of the 70s. The world's first cellular network started in Japan in 1979. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, the NMT network opened for business on 1 October 1981. The same technology was used for the cellular network based on NMT in Saudi Arabia which surprisingly became fully operational a month earlier. One of the biggest names in mobile phones launched its first car phone, the Mobira Senator, in 1981. Mobira was a joint venture between Finnish television maker Salora and a rubber and cable manufacturer called Nokia.

Courtesy of BT Heritage The next country to go mobile was the USA in 1983. Britain's system was based on the US system, but with certain modifications meaning that our phones would not be compatible in other countries. The UK's first hand held mobile phone was the American Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which debuted in the USA in 1983. They were as large as a house brick, much heavier and as costly as a small car. Britain's mobile phone network system was shaped by government policy. Large corporations were out and competition was in. The GPO, now the newly privatised British Telecom, was not going to be Britain's sole mobile provider. The Government insisted on two networks. The first was a joint venture between British Telecom and Securicor called Cellnet. The second was headed by defence communications specialist Racal and called Vodafone. Vodafone beat Cellnet to become Britain's first mobile network. In those days the cost of a mobile phone meant that they were only viable for businessmen, who needed to be in constant touch with the office. The cost could be justified in terms of saving time. It took another eight years before consumers started to get a look in with mobile technology.

GSM GSM was a product European co-operation. In the early days of cell phones different countries went their own way. To business users in Europe this was a disaster, as cell phones would stop working as they crossed borders. The body which started co-operation with mobile networks was CEPT, the European Conference of Post and Telecommunications administrations. CEPT was a meeting for experts from the postal and telecommunication providers in European countries. In 1982, CEPT set up a working group, the Groupe Spéciale Mobile, or GSM. GSM met for the first time in Stockholm with the idea of establishing a European standard around the 900Mhz band. The UK joined GSM, but was already going its own way with the ETACS system. [1] GSM officially launched nearly ten years later in 1991. It quickly became the standard in France and Germany, but the UK already had two analogue providers covering the country. However, analogue's days were numbered. The Government had already issued two new licences for mobile network providers on a digital format based on 1800Mhz called PCN.

These two new providers were meant to help spread mobile phone use out of the business community and make mobiles for the masses a real possibility. The two new providers were Mercury and Orange. However, the UK's first digital service provider was Vodafone, which started the UK's first GSM network in 1991. Vodafone's very limited service targeted high flying businessmen keen to take their cell phones to Europe. Rather than the beginning of a new service for consumers, the initial GSM network was even more exclusive than the original analogue one. Mercury One2One First of the new companies to offer a digital service was Mercury. Their One2One network offered limited coverage, initially in the M25 area only. The service launched on 7 September 1993 with two new phones: the M200 made by Siemens and the M300, a rebranded Motorola phone. Customers of the new network quickly discovered some of the most irritating aspects of digital communications. When the connection was poor it could sound as if you were talking to a Dalek. On the analogue networks you could always speak above the noise on a bad line, but digital voices broke up into metallic twangs. This was not the only issue.

Handsets were shoddily made. The plastic broke easily, especially on the battery of the M200 phone. Mercury's saving grace was that it offered free evening and weekend calls. The hope was that customers would see Mercury One2One as a replacement for their home phones. The age of consumer mobile phones had begun. Orange Orange was run by Hutchinson Telecommunications, a giant mobile phone dealer. Hutchinson's executives had their fingers burnt a few years earlier with the Rabbit phone. Based on cordless phone technology, the Rabbit phone, was a cheap alternative to mobile phones. You could make calls if a Telepoint denoted by a upturned R symbol, was nearby. It was meant to be a replacement for the public phone box, but for every Telepoint there were eighty phone boxes. Hutchinson's executives were careful not to make the same mistake. Orange had almost national coverage, excepting Wales, when it launched on 28 April 1994. They also picked better phones. The first Orange phone was a specially made Nokia, a derivative of the smart new Nokia 2110, which was the cutting edge phone of its day.

Metro Digital Vodaphone experimented with different tariff levels to lure in more customers. LowCall offered lower handset prices, but higher call chargers to less frequent users. In the Autumn of 1993 they launched MetroDigital as a direct competitor to Mercury's struggling One2One service. MetroDigital offered cheaper phones and offered cheaper calls if they were made from a nominated Metro cell, more expensive calls if from further away. Motorola StarTAC, that'll do nicely Whilst mobile phones were becoming cheaper, they were losing their kudos. The Motorola StarTAC changed all that. It was the world's first clam shell style phone, a natural evolution of the MicroTAC. Motorola advertised the new phone alongside a credit card, to show its diminutive size. It was no co-incidence that the credit card was an American Express Gold Card. At £1400, the StarTAC was firmly targeted at the Gold Card using class. Pay and go Whilst the new digital networks convinced some people it was time to go mobile, the biggest deterrent was the contract with the service provider. You had to sign up to monthly fees and call charges. Many people were happy to buy a mobile phone, but did not want this extra hassle.

Just as Vodafone pioneered GSM, they were also the first company to offer a pre-paid service on the old analogue system. However, pay-and-go did not really get to be a serious option until 1997 when One2One launched the first digital pre-paid service. By Christmas 1997 there was a choice of three pay and go services: Vodafone 'Pay As You Talk'; One2One 'Up 2 You' and Orange 'Just Talk'. Vodafone offered cheaper analogue phones including the Nokia Ringo, one of Nokia's last analogue phones, for �99. Both Orange and One2One offered just one choice of phone for �179.99. Fun and fashion An aftermarket industry sprung up around mobile phones, selling all sorts of gadgets to make mobile life easier. In 1997 for around £40, you could by a BTG 'Aloha Palmtree', a Swatch style see-through case, which could transform a plain Ericsson phone into a fashion accessory. There were a huge variety of other colours and styles to chose from. Unfortunately, to fit most of them you had to carefully disassemble the phone and void the warranty.

Ericsson went one better in 1997 with the new GA628 which had interchangeable front panels in different colours. However, the phone that captured the imagination of the fashion conscious young consumers was the Nokia 5110, launched the following year with its Xpress-On, fascias. Tipping point In 1999 the supermarkets starting selling mobile phones alongside fruit and veg. Tesco opened by discounting the price of a basic pay and go phone to £49.99. For that you got a basic black phone: a Motorola C520 on Orange and One2One; a Philips C12 BT Cellnet or a Sagem 815 Plus on Vodafone. Asda then undercut Tesco by reducing its price to £39.99. The year 2000 was the tipping point for mobile phone ownership. Supermarket deals on Pay as you Go phones helped push mobile ownership from 46% of the population to 76%. [2] Camera phones Once everyone could afford a phone, the race was on the make them buy another one. The latest craze to sweep Tokyo's youth in 2001 was the camera phone.

The Sharp J-SH04 was the hot gadget that could take pictures you could send to your friends. UK mobile users got a chance to join in the new fashion, when in 2002 T-Mobile launched the UK's first Mobile Picture Messaging Service. For an extra £20 per month users could send pictures using a new phone, the Sony Ericsson T68i. The T68i, although it supported picture messaging, lacked an essential feature - a camera. You had to take the photographs using a separate camera module. 3G Way back in 2000 service providers shelled out millions for the new 3G licences. The first 3G service '3', owned by Hutchinson Telecommunications of Orange and Rabbit Phone fame, began on 3 March 2003. 3G was slow to take off. Consumer magazine 'Which?', thought it offered little for the extra money. I phone In 2007, Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs announced the beginning of a new age when he told the world about the iPhone. Apple fans in their millions eagerly anticipated the latest gadget. Today a derivative of this product is still just as attractive. References 2.

Article on history of mobile phones from the University of Salford: Mobile phones Article by Steven Braggs , November 2011, corrections June 2012 Man who made first ever mobile phone call remembers moment 30 years on - Telegraph Man who made first ever mobile phone call remembers moment 30 years on Michael Harrison says it would have 'taken a rare imagination to see the true future' of mobiles Michael Harrison (left) making the first UK mobile phone call to his father Sir Michael Harrison at his Surrey home on 1 January 1985, on a 11lb (5kg) Transportable Vodafone VT1 Photo: Vodafone/PA By Press Association 7:15AM GMT 27 Dec 2014 The man who made the first ever mobile phone call in Britain has recalled the event 30 years on. Michael Harrison, the son of former Vodafone chairman Sir Ernest Harrison, became the first to test the system when he called his father at midnight on January 1 1985.

Mr Harrison had secretly left his family's New Year's Eve party at their home in Surrey to surprise his father, calling him from London's Parliament Square on the newly-launched Vodafone network. He made the call from the 11lb (5kg) Transportable Vodafone VT1, which boasted around 30 minutes of talk time. As Sir Ernest answered the phone, his son said: ''Hi Dad. It's Mike. This is the first-ever call made on a UK commercial mobile network.'' Related Articles Five Apple products 'that changed the world' 06 Oct 2011 Mr Harrison recalled that the line was ''crystal clear'', and his conversation was complicated only by the shouting of New Year's Eve revellers. He said: ''The setting was quite dramatic, standing by the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square surrounded by curious New Year's Eve revellers. ''I think neither they nor I had even seen a mobile phone before, let alone used one. ''There was also a little bit of cloak and dagger fun sneaking out of the family New Year's party to get whisked up to London to make the surprise call to my father.

''It was just like a normal telephone call - at least that's my recollection. I thought it might somehow sound quite different talking to somebody on a cellular network so it was a bit of a surprise that everything was so clear.'' He said he had no idea at the time that the mobile phone would become ubiquitous within a generation. He said: ''I did think that mobile would catch on, but more for people who had to be in contact like that, not as an indispensable part of everyone's daily life. ''Looking at the size of those first devices it would have taken a rare imagination to see the true future. Having said that, my father, for years before this first network went live, was often telling us how mobile phones would change the world.'' Days later, a crowd gathered at St Katherine's Dock in London to watch comedian Ernie Wise make the first public mobile phone call. Ernie Wise making the first celebrity UK mobile phone call to Sir Michael Harrison (Vodafone/PA) Wise took the same device used by Mr Harrison to the event in a 19th century mail coach to highlight the convenience of the new mobile phone.

Wise's call was received at the original Vodafone headquarters in Newbury, Berkshire, where a handful of employees were based in an office above an Indian restaurant. Such was the demand for a fully portable, cellular phone that more than 2,000 orders had been taken by the Vodafone sales team before Mr Harrison made his call from Parliament Square. By the end of 1985, more than 12,000 devices had been sold. All were far from portable and cost around £2,000 - equivalent to roughly £5,000 today. However, the early mobile phones symbolised a revolution in communications and were an instantly desirable item, and the brick-like devices featured in films and television shows from Wall Street to Only Fools And Horses. The first wave of full-page adverts, created by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency, declared: ''You can be in when you're out.'' Mungo Park was the first person to buy a cellular phone in the UK and was Vodafone's first-ever customer.

He was persuaded by his friend Ivan Donn, a salesman at Vodafone, to buy the VM1, a Panasonic in-car handset, 30 years ago for £1,200. Mr Park said: ''The impact of the phone was fantastic, adding an extra 90 minutes to my day and it quickly paid for itself. ''I could use the call to say goodnight to my children if I was heading home from work or running late, as well as calling businesses in different time zones day or night.'' Britons now make more than 132 million mobile phone calls a day. Vodafone group chief commercial and operations officer Paolo Bertoluzzo said: ''At launch, the founders of Vodafone targeted British business executives, sales representatives, journalists, doctors and veterinary surgeons. ''Thirty years later, Vodafone's customers range from young people in Europe, India and Africa through to the world's largest multinational businesses.

''While our business has changed beyond all recognition over the last three decades, our goal and purpose haven't: to continue to empower our customers, whoever and wherever they are, through connectivity as mobile, broadband and digital transform society in ways unimaginable in the 1980s.'' 30 years ago today, the first commercial UK 'mobile' phone call was made • The Register 30 years ago today, the first commercial UK 'mobile' phone call was made It was 1 Jan 1985 ... 1 Jan 2015 at 13:26, Simon Rockman The first mobile phone calls were made on Cellnet and Vodafone 30 years ago today. The companies we know as Vodafone and O2 today were Racal-Vodafone and Securicor-Cellnet back then, phones were the size of a small suitcase and only did voice. They didn’t even let you assign names to the numbers in the phonebook. The two companies had spent the months up to the 1 January launch deadline fighting for cell sites and testing coverage, particularly in London. There was no hint of site-sharing.

The services used analogue TACS (Total Access Control System), and later ETACS (Enhanced), as more frequencies became necessary. This wasn’t known as 1G but was the predecessor to GSM. All phones ran at 900MHz and up to 2.8W. Phones were big and heavy - as is pointed out in this video. Youtube Video It wasn’t the first mobile system in the UK, there was a Carphone Radio service called Band 3, but that was push-to-talk and all calls had to go through an operator. Calls were limited as was the number of users. You had to go on a list and wait for a subscriber to close an account before you could buy one. It wasn’t even the first cellular service, the Nordics had NMT as early as 1981 and AT&T had launched AMPs in Chicago in 1983, but the UK launch was massively significant, although even Vodafone and Cellnet didn’t realise it at the time.

The trophy for making the first call goes to Vodafone's Michael Harrison, the son of former Vodafone Chairman Sir Ernest Harrison, who was the first to test the system, calling his father at midnight on 1 January, 1985. Michael Harrison secretly left his family’s New Year’s Eve party at their home in Surrey in the UK to surprise his father, calling him from London’s Parliament Square. Harrison made the historic call from one of the first mobile devices – a Transportable Vodafone VT1, which weighed 11lb (5kg) and had around 30 minutes of talk time. Harrison recalls that the line was crystal clear, although the excited shouting of New Year’s Eve revellers in London created considerable background noise. As Sir Ernest Harrison answered the phone, Michael said: “Hi Dad. It’s Mike. This is the first-ever call made on a UK commercial mobile network”. Which isn’t quite “one small step” but is better than, “Watson come here I want to see you". The official press launch was held days later at St Katherine’s Dock in London where Vodafone had hired comedian Ernie Wise make the first public mobile phone call.

Wise brought the same Transportable device to St Katherine’s Dock in London in a 19th century mail coach, using one of the oldest forms of communications – sending a letter – to highlight the speed and convenience of these new mobile phones. Ernie Wise’s call was received at the original Vodafone headquarters, where a handful of employees were based in an office above an Indian restaurant in Newbury, Berkshire. Heavy and cumbersome, the first generation of mobile phones were sold in the UK from 1984 – before the first products were even available and before the network was officially live. Such was the demand for a fully portable, cellular phone that more than 2,000 orders had been taken by the Vodafone sales team before Michael Harrison made his call from Parliament Square. By the end of 1985, over 12,000 devices had been sold. Vodafone is asking people to share their memories of getting their first mobile phone and making their first mobile call, using the hashtags #myfirstmobile and #30yearsVodafone. 80s Mobile phones 80s Mobile phones Brick mobile phones from the 80s are rapidly becoming a cult retro item.

They were very expensive when new and at first used only by top executives and City traders. By the end of the decade, they were an invaluable business tool for travelling salesmen, builders and delivery drivers as well, but were out of reach for personal use for most people. The hand held mobile, as opposed to a heavy transportable essentially a handset attached to a 12v car battery, was a status symbol for Yuppies in the 80s and a source of irritation on trains and in restaurants for everyone else. Only the 2G digital phones of the 90s made today's mass mobile phone ownership possible. The original mobile phones from the 80s were referred to as bricks, because they were as big as a house brick. In the 80s, mobile phone users were rare a sight and the size of the handset made their users stand out in a crowd. The brick size, together with their exclusivity, makes retro mobile phones from the 80s collectible today. Radio phones A mobile phone is essentially a phone that uses radio waves rather than wires. Radio telephones were possible in the Second World War. However, it needed transistor technology to make them small enough to carry around.

From the sixties onwards, the emergency services made use of radio telephones. The police walkie talkie was an example of a portable early radio phone. However, the range was short and few frequencies were available. A few individuals could afford radio phones in their cars in the 70s and in the early years of the 80s. However, a very small number of channels were available and new customers had to join a waiting list. A new system, the cellular system, promised change. The Cellular system The purpose of the cellular system was to make best use of the limited number of channels available. To get an idea of how limited a resource the radio channels were, the Cellnet system operated jointly by BT and Securicor, initially had 300 voice channels to cover the entire network. The cellular system divided the area covered by the mobile network into cells. Each cell was adjacent to six other cells. You can think of cells as a patchwork made from hexagons. When a call was made it went initially to a receiver/transmitter for that cell. The call was then routed via other cells or the landline network to its eventual destination.

The phone needed two channels, or radio frequencies, to communicate on to send and receive voice. To avoid clashes adjacent cells could not use the same frequencies. So based on the hexagon layout, one cell could use one seventh of the available frequencies. Depending on the size of the cells, a small number of frequencies could be made to go a long way. There was an invisible handover procedure as a phone moved from one cell to another, for example a car phone in a moving vehicle. The first UK mobile phone call On 1 January 1985 Ernie Wise made the first cellular call in the UK on the Vodafone system operated by Racal. It was very quickly joined by the Cellnet system operated jointly by BT and Securicor. The Government played a big part in the make up of the early mobile phone network. Only two network providers were authorised, Cellnet and Vodaphone. Neither network provider could supply contracts or cell phones directly to the public. Each supported a network of independent retailers. This was meant to ensure competition. There was some debate as to whether we had a true competitive environment amongst mobile providers, especially when prices of phones plummeted in the late eighties, but charges for using the networks did not.

Some of the early mobile phone retailers were Phone Inn for Cellnet and ECT Cellular, run by Marc Albert, who at one time in his life cleaned Datsuns for a living. ECT Cellular was, in 1987, the largest independent Vodaphone service provider. Early mobile phones Mitsubishi Roamer (1986) Excell M1/M2 (1985) British Telecom marketed a number phones made by other manufacturers under names Pearl (Mitsubishi), Opal (Motorola DynaTAC 8000S) and Coral (made by Japanese firm Kokusai). By 1986 Cellnet had 31,000 customers and Vodafone 25,000. Those customers were initially top business executives and City traders. The cost of mobile phones in those early days was prohibitively high. A Motorola 8000X, the world's first hand held mobile phone, cost 2990 [over 6000 in today's money]. The cost did not end with the phone itself, subscription charges and call charges were also high. The hand held phone quickly became a status symbol.

It was a common sight and sound in top London restaurants in the second half of the 80s, causing annoyance to other customers. Mobile phones were also making their presence felt on trains and on the streets. The status value of the early hand held, or hand portable mobile phones, is partly illustrated by the film 'Wall Street' (1987). Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) uses a Motorola 8000X (or possibly an 8000S) whilst on the beach. Up and coming junior stock broker, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) uses public phone booths to call Gekko. In real life, stock broker, Sean Murphy, made good use of his mobile phone and his native Gaelic tongue. After a meeting at Alan Sugar's Brentwood offices he sat back on the coach to the City listening to rival analysts discussing the results on their mobile phones. He then was able to tell fellow Irishman, Conor McEnroy, at head office that they had all revised their forecasts downwards in his native Gaelic tongue, without fellow passengers overhearing. 80s cell phone users thought little of using them on the move in their cars.

A MORI survey from 1988 confirmed that over half of mobile phone users were happy to make calls whilst driving and only 12 percent were prepared to ignore incoming calls, even when driving at high speed. Motorola DynaTAC 8000X and 8500X The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was manufactured in the US by Motorola. Americans got cell phones two years earlier than the UK in 1983. The Motorola 8000X was available in three colour schemes: dark grey, tan and grey or tan and white. Dyna is derived from the Greek and means power. TAC stands for Total Area Coverage. The slightly cheaper Motorola 8000S, introduced in 1985, had one fewer function key. In 1987 Motorola introduced the DynaTAC 8500X. This phone was more common in the UK. It added another function, a 'name' key and came in black and grey. The name key allowed the storing of callers' names. This was an advance over the 8000X.

The 8500X had an alphabetic keypad to support this feature (right). The Dynatac 8500X has larger LEDs than the 8000X or 8000S. In the US the Motorola Dynatac 8000M is more common and followed on from the Dynatac 8000S and 8000X phones. It also has larger LEDs than the 8000X and 8000S. This is the main way to tell these phones apart. See also: Motorola 8500X Nokia Mobira Cityman A challenge to the dominance of Motorola came surprisingly from Finland in the early to mid 80s. The Nokia company initially manufactured paper and rubber products. More recently it branched into the manufacture of colour televisions. The first Nokia mobile phones though were branded as Mobiras. Mobira Oy was originally a joint venture between Nokia and Salora Oy to make VHF radio equipment. Nokia bought Salora in 1984 and changed the name of Mobira Oy to Nokia-Mobira Oy.

Nokia first entered the cell phone market with a radio phone called the Mobira Senator. Nokia-Mobira also launched one of the world's first transportables, the Mobira Talkman, in 1984. The Nokia-Mobira Cityman was a newcomer onto the handheld mobile market in 1987. Russian Head of State, Mikhail Gorbachev was handed one to receive a call in 1989, a marketing coup for Finnish firm Nokia. The Cityman used hard edge 80s styling and set the pace in design. Earlier phones by Motorola were more conservative. Their two tone look was more reminiscent of an earlier era. The Nokia Cityman was truly a phone for the 80s, a time obsessed with style and image. Nokia originally marketed the Cityman as a Nokia-Mobira Cityman. I have seen various model numbers quoted: the Cityman 450, Cityman 900 and Cityman 1320. Nokia's worldwide sales increased 28% in 1987 and by 1988 the Finnish firm held 13.5% of the mobile phone market.

In the UK, Nokia-Mobira sales were around 9 to 10% of the total UK cell phone market. See also: Mobira Nokia Cityman British Telecom Mobile Phone British Telecom marketed mobile phones through a separate operation, 'BT Mobile Phones', essentially rebranding other manufacturers' mobile phones. Their first hand held mobile was the British Telcom Opal , a rebranded Motorola Dynatac 8000S. In 1986 they added the BT Pearl which was made by Mitsubishi then later the Coral by Kokusai and the Ivory, also made by a Japanese manufacturer. Two British companies did though enter the mobile phone market, Orbitel, owned by Racal and Plessey, and Technophone. Technophone Technophone was a company set up in 1984 by Nils Martensson, a Swedish radio engineer who left Ericsson to set up on his own in 1978. Technophone manufactured the Pocketphone, 7 inches tall, 3 inches wide and 1 inch deep: pretty small for the time.

By early 1986 they were turning out 1000 pocket phones a month sold through Excell Communications as the Excell M1 and M2. Technophone was bought by Nokia in 1991. The Pocketphone cost ï¿½1990 to buy out right or ï¿½11.99 a week to lease. The Pocketphone worked on both Cellnet and Vodaphone networks and could change networks at the push of a button. NEC 9A Another challenger to Motorola's dominance was Japanese manufacture NEC (formerly the Nippon Electric Company). NEC launched the NEC 9A handheld mobile phone in the UK in Autumn 1987. It was well received by the dealers, being smaller and lighter than its rivals, as well as offering more functions. It quickly became the fastest selling hand held mobile phone. Initially the NEC 9A was relatively expensive. Only Nokia and Phillips asked for more money for a mobile handset. With so much competition, Motorola acted to maintain its market share by cutting the cost of hand held cell phones by 20%. This action started a price war which sent the cost of basic hand held phones tumbling.

By the end of 1988 it was possible to get a basic, hand held phone for 500 [still over 1000 in today's money]. Mobile phones were still mainly a business tool, but those further down the corporate pay scale were now able to get their hands on one. Peter Waller, MD of Cellnet, claimed his window cleaner used a handheld mobile phone to take orders whilst he was up a ladder. Cell phone use spreads Mobile phone use caught on quickly in spite of the early high prices of the phones. By Autumn 1986 there were 100,000 UK customers. Recal-Vodaphone had taken the lead from Cellnet. By Summer 1987 there were 200,000 UK mobile phone customers. Cellnet refused to disclose numbers, but it was clear that Vodaphone was ahead. As mobile phone use spread, more business users were able to take advantage of the new technology. Cell phones became useful for travelling salesmen and delivery drivers. However, these people had to be content with a car phone or transportable, essentially a handset attached to a 12v car battery.

The hand held mobile was still highly praised. Even as late as 1990, the then England Football Team Manager Bobby Robson's purchase of a Nokia Cityman made the news. London taxi cabs got mobile phones in May 1987, supplied by Capital Taxiphone, which was backed by Racal-Vodaphone. In October 1987 National Express coaches were equipped with mobile phones. They also appeared as mobile payphones on InterCity trains. From 1988 it was possible to make mobile payphone calls from aeroplanes using BT's Skyphone service. Skyphone used INMSRSAT and communicated directly with BTI's Goonhilly Earth Station. Mobile phones had become an invaluable business tool by the end of the 80s, but the analogue cellular network could only accommodate comparatively few subscribers. It needed the introduction of the 2G digital network for mass ownership to become a reality. In the 80s, pundits thought mobile phones would get smaller. Many thought that they would follow the example of pocket calculators and shrink to the size of a wristwatch or credit card.

Motorola MicroTAC Motorola regained their advantage in the mobile market at the end of the 80s with the MicroTAC 9800X introduced in 1989. This was the world's first flip phone, a precursor of the modern clamshell. The aerial popped out when the phone was opened. It was not actually functional, but market research showed people liked an aerial. Other ways to get mobile in the 80s Cordless phones The Official British Yuppie Handbook shows a Yuppie gent in a suit holding a beige phone with an aerial. It is cordless phone, not a true mobile phone. The original gadget-obsessed Yuppies bought cordless phones before mobile phones became available. Improvements in technology meant that cordless phones became cheaper in the 80s. By 1985 the ï¿½100 price barrier was broken. In 1986 you could buy a Uniden cordless phone for ï¿½99.95; Dixons retailed the CSI 2200 for ï¿½84.99 and Comet the Betacom C1000 for ï¿½89.95.

There was talk of using cordless phone technology to produce a basic mobile phone for the general public, but it never caught on. The Novaphone The Novaphone was a cross between a cell phone and a pager. The Novaphone had a car phone which could be contacted from anywhere in the world, but could only make a number of pre-programmed outgoing calls. The pager was a small pocket device that you could take with you when out of the car. If you were still in range, the pager would receive a signal from the car phone. If you received a call on the car phone, it would page you and you could either hold the call until you got back to the car, or have it transferred to another preset number. A mobile for the shower? Can you use a mobile phone in the shower? You could probably use this one! This sponge mobile phone was made by Boots the Chemist in the late 80s. Looking at the keypad it is actually replica of a cordless phone, but it was probably meant to be a mobile. Can you use a retro mobile phone today? The short answer is no. All the phones featured in this article use the original analogue cellular system and will not work on today's networks.

None will accept a modern SIM card. However, there was some overlap in design when the 2G digital system came in. The Motorola 3200 for example, looks very similar, although not identical, to the 8000 and 8500 series phones made in the 80s. It does work on the new system. Later versions of the Motorola MicroTAC also work on the new GSM system. There are also modern retro style phones available that work on the GSM system. They look like some of the earlier Motorola phones, but are much lighter. More on retro mobile phones The definitive mobile phone history site - Mobile phone history . There is a Wikipedia article about the Motorola Dyantac 8000X - see Motorola Dyantac 8000X on Wikipedia There is a pictorial history of Nokia phones from 1982 to 2004 on this Nokia mobile phones timeline . This timeline also covers the Technophone, which became a Nokia brand in 1991, as well as the Nokia and Mobira Cityman mobile phones. There were mobile phone in the 60s see: Retro mobile phone .

80s mobile phones on eBay You can buy brick phones on eBay. Most will not work today, because they are on the old analogue system. However, it's great to own a piece of history. If you want a phone you can use today get the Motorola 3200. It was made in the early 90s, but looks just like a brick phone from the 80s. It was the last true brick phone made and the only one to work on GSM. Your comments on 80s retro mobile phones "During a recent trip up to the loft I came across my old NEC 204844-1A it worked when I put it in the loft in the 80's how would I go about selling it or how much do you think it would be worth. Thanks for your time." Idris Hi Idris, There is a strong market for 80s mobile phones on eBay. I would recommend doing a search through completed listings on eBay to find out how much it is worth. Retrowow "Hi Am Doing A Project On The 80s And This Infomation Is Very Helpful Thank You" Joe Ireland "I had one of these...

the memories it brought back reading your page. Thanks." Dave Morgan "ehmmmmm when was the first fone call made !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Liam Hi Liam, The first private hand held mobile phone call was made by Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1983. The first UK mobile phone call was made by Ernie Wise on 1 January 1985. There were car phones and mobile phones going back to the sixties. See retro mobile phone .

The first ever telephone call was made in 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell, see Retrowow "Sorry to burst the celebrity bubble of Ernie Wise making the first cellular call on 1st January 1985 - As Beta testers we were using them from December 24th 1984 as part of the final test regime for the first Cellnet site on the Post office (BT) Tower." "I recall taking myself to first Wrotham Hill , then Detling Hill to determine the max range of this first cellsite that was 'top hating' London with the first TACS cells using the GO-Phone 2000 badged NEC 'Banana phone' with the first two allocated phone numbers to BT Securicor 0860 326000 and 326002. We have come a long way in 25 years...." John "i was wondering if anyone could tell me what year the nec 204844-1a mobile phone was made" karen chapman Hi Karen, Sorry I don't know. If you can send me a picture of it, I might have a better idea.

Retrowow "How can I get hold of one of these Excell mobiles, I had one in the eighties cost about 1500 was on cellnet can you get one to use with a modern chip on vodafone ??? Cheers Gareth" Gareth Gee Hi Gareth, They are very rare. I've seen a couple on eBay. They sell for ï¿½100+. Unfortunately, they do not work on the modern GSM network. Retrowow "phones in the 80s were awesome so original should bring them back" hannah "Hello Steven. What an amazing site. - I have an BT Branded Motorola DynaTAC 8000S. I've been trawling the web & ebay but can't seem to find past or present sales. I'd be most grateful if you're able to help with a valuation. Keep up the sterling work Sir !" James Hi James, The BT 8000S sells for £80 to £100 on eBay. Condition plays a part. A really scruffy example might be worth less. An absolute mint one more.

Retrowow "Hi i have a brand new boxed Motorola 8900-2 its still in the box complete with all the stuff and a 1984 tariff were can i sell it?" Wayne Turner Hi Wayne, eBay is the best place to sell the phone. Expect to make from £20 to £60. Retrowow "Great site! I had an NEC 9A around 1993 on the Vodafone network, and the other day bought an iPhone; things have certainly changed!" Horeslover Fat "Hi I own a Mobira Talkman hand held transportable mobile phone, one of the very first transportable phones available. I have had this from new and still have the chargers and instruction book. I am considering selling or putting up for auction. Do you know of any specialist auctioneers or museums. Thanks, John." John Baylay 28/08/2010 "Was it possible to make international calls using a mobile during the eighties?" Dave Parry 30/09/2010 "Hi, Please could you give me a call.

I need a brick style mobile phone preferably in cream or beige, by this Thursday, so next day delivery. I can be contacted on 07779 272 104. Thanks

Question: The UK’s first mobile phone call, in 1985, was across which network?
Answer: Vodaphone